With its symphonic sound, thunderous beats and aching melodies The Soft Bulletin was quite unlike anything this writer had heard back in 1999. The Dark Side shows are alternated with performances of the Lips's 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin, including an ATP Don't Look Back extravaganza at London's Alexandra Palace on July 1 that also sees Deerhoof and Dinosaur Jr performing two of their own classic albums.Īt a time when the Lips are reinventing themselves, it makes sense to revisit The Soft Bulletin, which was itself the result of a radical shift in the way the band made records. Befitting such a cosmically inclined show, the British leg takes place at Jodrell Bank Observatory. And in our time-out-of-joint era, why not? Last year the band recorded their own surprisingly effective take on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and a new version, which incorporates elements of The Wizard Of Oz soundtrack, is being toured this summer. Seeing where these experiments take the band in the long term should be interesting.Īll this visionary madness is paralleled with some more retrospective projects. The results so far have been rather splendid, ranging from heavy psychedelic freakouts to wah-wah laced cosmo-jazz. All this furthers the experiments of 2009's Embryonic, which saw the Lips adopt a looser, jam-based approach. An EP with Prefuse 73 is the latest transmission from the Lips' satellite heart, and tantalising collaborations with Nick Cave and Lighting Bolt are reportedly in the works. Clearly enamoured of the possibilities of shaped candy, Coyne has announced on his always entertaining Twitter feed that there will be two more gummy releases: a foetus and a vagina. Since then we have had a 12" collaborative EP with Neon Indian, and the Gummy Song Skull: a life-sized jelly skull containing a flash drive with new tracks on it. The first fruit of this was 'Two Blobs Fucking', a piece in twelve parts which seeks to do for the iPhone what 1997's Zaireeka did for boomboxes. 2011 has seen a flurry of activity from the Lips camp, following their pledge to release a song a month. "It's a great, explosive, strange time to be in the Flaming Lips for sure," says Wayne Coyne over the phone from Barcelona, where the band are gearing up to perform at the Primavera Sound festival.